[Mr_P]

Android and Chrome need on-device AI capabilities. Google can't lock down those weights like it can with server-side ML.

So it's easier to just release those models as open source and make it official, since someone would inevitably hack the weights out anyway.

[Aachen]

Could say the same for camera processing in the Pixel Camera app or any other binary someone wants to re-use that comes included in a software distribution (seemingly for 'free'). They can't lock the instructions up on the server so they might as well make the binary be freely distributable?

Companies don't commonly give away executable binaries "just because", why'd they start now for these binary blobs that are the models?

Not that I'm unhappy about it! Yay for open data any day, I'm just not understanding why, at least beyond PR in nerd circles

[lukeschlather]

Binaries are source code outputs, they are copyrightable and patentable. Weights are not copyrightable so people can freely extract the weights and run them. If Google patents any of the novel algorithms here releasing it all freely isn't an impediment to making people license it.

[Aachen]

Weights are not copyrightable?!

Are you sure that isn't about LLMs' outputs? There I know there have been some court cases that say this, but the model itself is a work created in intricate and somewhat creative ways (I hesitate to use the word "creative" here, but would similarly hesitate to label a routine picture of the moon creative whereas pictures basically always have copyright; the bar for creativity is basically an epsilon amount above zero, afaik)

[jack_pp]

Because a model like this can't be as easily obfuscated as image processing. Image processing is a bundle of many moving parts, a lot of functions each with it's own inputs and outputs. A model is a single function which can be easily extracted and reused, in comparison

[Aachen]

Arguably, but that's not the point. Take image (e.g. png) files on a CD-ROM shipped by a game vendor, which can be trivially copied even by my grandma. That doesn't move the game vendor to release them as freely distributable under the Apache license

[jack_pp]

Good point but still, why would Google police this model? If they had a restrictive licence on it do you think it would be worth it for them to enforce it? This way they at least buy some good will and mindshare

[Aachen]

That makes sense to me. Guess one might say the same for game icons and other such files that lay around in disks, but yeah maybe it's as simple as that

[jack_pp]

Not quite the same, understandably Blizzard cares a lot about their IP because otherwise private servers leech their users. Maybe a small game designer cares a lot about the small game they made or whatever since that's all they have. A four trillion market cap company can afford to be "charitable".. where it costs them nothing and might cost them more to enforce their rights.

[panarky]

> can't lock down those weights

They could lock them down legally which would prevent commercial use, but they choose not to, and they boast about how many tens of millions of times Gemma models have been downloaded by developers.

So there must be more to the rationale than just local model weights getting hacked out of devices.

[goobatrooba]

But these can't be the same model - the model is far too demanding to be part of regular chrome for most people.